I just returned this week from a 2 weeks vacation and got straight back into the action... Just 2 days ago I was in a meeting in Sun Microsystems, and halfway through the meeting, Sun actually became Oracle, after being purchased by the latter in one of the biggest deals lately...Many analysts seem to think that Oracle will use this acquistion to provide with a full IT solution (i.e. Oracle's DB and software and Sun's servers) and be able to compete more fiercely with IBM. However, I believe that Sun's greatest asset is not its hardware. In fact, Sun lost a lot of its edge in the high-end and robust computing arena in recent years to competitors of all kinds. Its SPARC processor that was in the heart of their servers in the past lost its place to Intel in almost every market which led Sun itself to move to Intel some years ago. After that, the dive into becoming a commodity in a saturated was pretty quick.
But Sun has one thing that tops any hardware - and that's Java. What started as a side project evolved to become one of the most dominant programming languages in the world, and spawned to power a wide range of applications: desktop, enterprise and mobile. Oracle is a software company and has invested a lot in Java as it is. So it seems to me that this is the strong connection point between the two companies and not necessarily the hardware. It will be interesting to see what Oracle's vision is with Java, and in particular J2ME.
Also it would be interesting to see Oracle's strategy in regards to MySQL which was acquired by Sun lately. MySQL is a cheap and simple competitor to Oracle's elaborate DB software, will it remain free for development/non-commercial? Will it remain at all?... (Probably it will and be renamed to Oracle super-ultra-lite or something like it...)
And on more Java news - Google App engine now supports Java! These are great news for all Java developers. Up until now the engine supported Python only, but now it supports a real programming language... (Just kidding Python is also cool...), for those of you who don't know, Google's app engine basically allows you to run your appliation on their computing cloud, similar to what Amazon is offering, but with Google, the first 5M page hits or so per month are free...
And last but not least, LWUIT, Sun's (or should I already say Oracle's) UI framework for J2ME is making some great progress, I am working closely with several companies helping them adopt it, and also working with Sun/Oracle on some interesting projects that will give LWUIT even more "zing" in some markets.
Anyway, it's going to be a pretty busy month or two, but I'll still try to squeeze in a post here and there...
